Lilian Edwards

Lilian Edwards is a UK academic and frequent speaker on issues of Internet law and intellectual property. She is on the Advisory Board of the Open Rights Group and the Foundation for Internet Privacy Research and is the Professor specialising in Internet law at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow.

Academic career

Edwards has taught information technology, e-commerce and Internet law at undergraduate and postgraduate level since 1996 and been involved with law and artificial intelligence (AI) since 1985.

She worked at Strathclyde University from 1986–1988 and Edinburgh University from 1989 to 2006. She became Chair of Internet Law at the University of Southampton from 2006–2008, and then Professor of Internet Law at the University of Sheffield until late 2010, when she returned to Scotland to become Professor of E-Governance at Strathclyde University, while retaining close links with the renamed SCRIPT (AHRC Centre) at Edinburgh. She also has close links with the Oxford Internet Institute and the Web Science Trust.

She has co-edited (with Charlotte Waelde) three collections on Law and the Internet in 1997, 2000 and 2009. Her work in on-line consumer privacy won the Barbara Welberry Memorial Prize in 2004 for "the best solution to the problem of privacy and transglobal data flows". A collection of her essays, The New Legal Framework for E-Commerce in Europe was published in 2005. She is Associate Director, and was co-founder, of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Centre for IP and Technology Law (now SCRIPT). She has been a visiting scholar and invited lecturer to universities in the USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, China, Israel and Latin America. Edwards has served as a consultant for the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the United Nations in the form of the OECD and WIPO, as well as for Google and the software publishers Symantec and McAfee.^[1]

Edwards has also co-chaired GikII, a series of European workshops on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture.^[2] She has been a prominent voice in the debates around the controversial Digital Economy Act 2010 in the UK, and is also, as a specialist in data privacy law, concerned with the reform process of the EC Data Protection Directive. Other current areas of focus include Net censorship, cybersecurity and cyberwar, law and social networks such as Facebook, legal liability for robots, and what happens to digital assets after we die.

Other Interests

Edwards was an active science fiction fan during the 1980s and 1990s, and won the TransAtlantic Fan Fund in 1988 on a joint platform with her friend Christina Lake; they had previously co-edited the fanzine This Never Happens.^[3]

References

External links

• panGloss, Edwards' blog